Imagine if Denmark's environmental authorities could see every protected meadow, bog, and lake from space and receive automatic alerts whenever something changes. Not annually. Not every five years. In real-time.

This is no longer science fiction. Koordinat.ai is making it reality by combining Earth observation data from ESA's Copernicus Sentinel satellites with artificial intelligence to revolutionize how Denmark monitors and protects Section 3 nature areas, the legally protected habitats that define 10% of the Danish landscape.

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Denmark's Hidden Biodiversity Crisis: The Gap Between Law and Reality

Denmark has established a comprehensive legal framework for nature protection. Section 3 of the Danish Nature Conservation Act designates specific as legally protected. Together, these areas cover roughly 10% of Denmark's land surface, representing critical biodiversity refuges in an otherwise heavily managed agricultural landscape.

However, legal designation is not the same as actual protection. Danish municipalities are responsible for monitoring Section 3 areas, but the traditional approach has remained largely unchanged for decades: periodic field surveys, manual mapping, and infrequent updates. Many protected areas are assessed only every 5-10 years, if they are assessed at all.

This temporal lag creates a critical blind spot. Biodiversity loss, land use change, and habitat degradation happen continuously. Agricultural intensification accelerates year to year. Drainage systems are installed. Climate change alters growing conditions. By the time authorities conduct the next field survey, significant changes may have already occurred, often irreversibly.

Meanwhile, municipalities lack resources to increase survey frequency. Field teams are expensive. Expertise in habitat classification is specialized and scarce. Managing multiple survey methodologies across hundreds of hectares creates inconsistency. And fundamentally, even intensive ground surveys cannot provide the comprehensive coverage that 10% of the nation's land surface demands.

Without timely, accurate data, several consequences follow. Landowners face uncertainty about which regulations apply to their property. Authorities struggle to enforce protections: how can they enforce something they haven't recently verified still exists? Conflicts arise between conservation mandates and land use. And Denmark's biodiversity commitments, enshrined in EU policy, national legislation, and international agreements, remain difficult to verify and defend.

For policymakers, the question becomes: How much Section 3 nature actually remains? Has the area expanded or contracted? Is quality improving or declining? These fundamental questions should have clear, continuous answers, but instead they remain ambiguous, updated sporadically at significant cost and effort.

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Koordinat's Solution: Making Space Data Actionable

Understanding how satellite data works is one thing. Translating it into a tool that Danish municipalities can actually use is another entirely.

Koordinat has built a system that sits at the intersection of Earth observation, artificial intelligence, and municipal workflow integration. The core components include:

1. Continuous satellite data ingestion: Automatically acquiring Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery as it becomes available
2. AI-powered classification: Running trained models to classify every pixel as a specific Section 3 habitat type or non-protected land use
3. Change detection algorithms: Comparing temporal sequences to identify changes, their magnitude, and their significance
4. Municipal integration: Feeding results directly into existing GIS systems that municipalities already use, ensuring minimal disruption to established workflows
5. National database integration: Linking to Naturdatabasen, Denmark's official nature database, so data flows to regional and national levels
6. Visualization and alerting: Presenting information in formats that case workers and decision-makers can understand and act upon

Koordinat.ai is currently being tested by five Danish municipalities:

• Aabenraa Kommune (Southern Jutland)
• Høje-Taastrup Kommune (Greater Copenhagen)
• Ringsted Kommune (Zealand)
• Roskilde Kommune (Zealand)
• Vejle Kommune (Eastern Jutland)

These pilots span diverse geographic contexts, coastal zones, agricultural regions, urban peripheries, and peat-dominated landscapes. This geographic diversity provides essential validation that the AI models work across Denmark's varied habitats and environmental conditions.

Feedback from these pilots is informing refinement of the classification models, improvement of the integration with municipal systems, and development of additional features that case workers identify as valuable.

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ESA BIC Denmark's Role: From Concept to Scale

Koordinat's journey from concept to municipal deployment is supported by ESA BIC Denmark.

What ESA BIC Denmark Provides

The program offers a comprehensive package designed specifically for startups applying space technology to real challenges:

• €60,000 in non-equity funding - allowing the startup to invest in technology development, customer engagement, and market validation without surrendering equity or control
• Technical expertise from ESA
• Connections to Danish research institutions – partnerships with DTU Space, Aarhus University Space Centre (AU Space), Aalborg University Space, and University of Southern Denmark, providing research expertise and validation capabilities
• Investor matchmaking – introduction to venture capital firms, corporate investors, and government agencies interested in climate tech and environmental solutions
• Community and visibility – participation in events, conferences, and promotions that raise profile with potential customers and partners

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Conclusion: Space Technology Serving Biodiversity

Koordinat.ai represents a profound shift in how environmental protection can work. Rather than relying on periodic, expensive, expert-intensive field surveys, protection can be grounded in continuous, objective, satellite-derived data. Rather than treating nature conservation as separate from land use management, integrated monitoring enables intelligent coexistence.

Koordinat is what becomes possible when that space infrastructure meets Danish entrepreneurship, AI expertise, and a genuine public need. As biodiversity declines globally and environmental governance becomes increasingly urgent, solutions like Koordinat offer hope.